Federal Court of Appeal Says "No" to Postponing One-Year Receipting Suspension

  • April 04, 2022
  • Deina Warren

In Human Concern International v Canada, 2022 FCA 41, the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) dismissed an appeal by Human Concern to postpone the one-year suspension of its receipting privileges. 

Background

Following an audit, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) imposed a penalty and suspended Human Concern’s receipting privileges for one year. CRA’s took the position that Human Concern was involved in making false charitable tax receipts. Human Concern filed a notice of objection to this conclusion.

It also applied to the Tax Court asking that its suspension be postponed (s 188.2(4) Income Tax Act) until its notice of objection had been fully and finally addressed. The Tax Court dismissed the application, and Human Concern appealed to the FCA.

Issues on appeal

The two main issues decided by the FCA were:

  1. Did the FCA have jurisdiction to hear the appeal?
  2. Did the Tax Court err in its decision?

Jurisdiction

Although the parties didn’t raise the issue, the FCA itself raised the issue about whether it had jurisdiction to hear the appeal. The FCA pointed to s 27 of the Federal Courts Act which only gives authority to hear appeals from certain types of interlocutory orders and that "in the circumstances of this case, a right of appeal is provided only if the order of the Tax Court is a final judgment." But the FCA chose not to rule on this issue one way or the other because it dismissed the appeal for other reasons.